


Dead, to Begin With

by nimmieamee (orphan_account)



Category: Riverdale (TV 2017)
Genre: Ghosts, Multi, equal-opportunity playbook sex acts, low standards for athlete behavior, maple-related hauntings
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-03-31
Updated: 2017-04-01
Packaged: 2018-10-13 06:58:09
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 2
Words: 4,241
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10508646
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/nimmieamee
Summary: Reggie Mantle is barely around these days.He's too busy being haunted by Jason, who cannot go to heaven until he successfully makes Reggie slightly less of a dick.





	1. Chapter 1

On July 13th, Reggie Mantle was jogging across the Sweetwater bridge, minding his own business, when Jason appeared.

It wasn't even Friday the 13th. It was a Wednesday.

Jason was standing by the side of the bridge. He was all in white. His hair was plastered horribly against his head and his eyes were so sunken that for a second it was like he had no eyes.

"You look horrible," Reggie shouted out. 

"Repent," Jason said. "Repent."

Reggie said, "Hey, I'm not the one who bailed on the Bulldog end-of-year-party."

Jason hadn't had the time to attend, supposedly. He was student body president and also a talented singer-songwriter, not to mention an octuple-varsity athlete: co-captain of the football team and solo captain of the water polo, field hockey, ice hockey, wrestling, fencing, tennis, and curling teams. 

As Reggie had tried to explain to Coach Clayton numerous times, Jason was not a good fit to co-captain the Bulldogs precisely because he tended to overextend himself like this.

"That sounds like jealousy talking to me," Coach Clayton said. "I'm very disappointed in you, Reggie."

"Disappointed in me? He's dealing crack and he has a secret love baby on the way," Reggie had said, clicking ahead in his 'Jason Blossom: Not A Good Captain' powerpoint to get to those slides. Coach Clayton had only shaken his head at him.

"Just yesterday, he handed Ethel Muggs the last Dixie cup they had by the water fountain," Coach said. "That shows real chivalry. When was the last time you gave away a Dixie cup, Reggie?"

So Jason got to keep his share of the Captaincy. And Reggie was left with nothing but a really killer powerpoint and a lot of resentment.

"You will jog the cold, lonely path to hell if you do not repent," Jason said now, his voice oddly raspy.

Reggie decided that Jason was getting into his own stash. He ignored Jason and jogged the rest of the way across the bridge, where he turned onto the Greendale trail.

At the fork in the road where the maple trees grew all gnarled together like they were having spooky, intimate tree sex, Jason appeared again.

"Shit!" Reggie said.

Because Jason wasn't there, but then he was. Superhero-fast. Reggie had read once about meth heads in Indiana and bath salts addicts in Florida who acquired weird, terrifying powers and started biting people's faces off. He slowly, deliberately began to jog backwards.

"Reggie," Jason rasped out.

"Dude, I do not want whatever you're dealing. I'm clean," Reggie said. He didn't want to turn his back on Jason, but he didn't want to move anywhere but backwards, away from Jason, so he kept on jogging until he backed into a maple tree.

"Before I can pass on," Jason said, his voice somehow indiscernible from the hum of the wind in the trees, "I must help one soul, Reggie. One soul who is as lost as I was in life. _You_."

Then Jason's skin became gnarled maple wood, and his hair turned into autumn-red maple leaves, and his eyes sunk away until they were nothing but small acorns tucked into the hollows of his weathered wooden face. Reggie started screaming.

-

Reggie's mother owned the premier gym chain in the Riverdale-Greendale-Lawndale area. It was named Zip and it employed all the Mantle boys as personal trainers, which meant that Reggie as the youngest didn't technically have to go to college but he was going to go to college anyway because he liked to commit to living his life three-hundred-and-thirty-three percent. Which was, incidentally, Zip's motto.

Reggie's father toured the country giving speeches about how people could just overcome sad problems like addiction, depression, and weight gain by being better at being people.

He'd asked people all around the nation, "Have you considered not being like this? Really considered it? Really? Really?" until those people broke down and cried and admitted that maybe they hadn't and they were personal failures.

To which Reggie's father usually said, "Have you considered...not being a failure?"

Reggie's father was one of the wealthiest men in the state, right after Clifford Blossom.

It had never occurred to Reggie that he might have a problem he couldn't take to his parents, but after Jason started shimmering into view next to Reggie's bed at night, howling graveyard-animal howls in Reggie's ears while Reggie was trying to play squash with his brothers, and dripping maple sap ectoplasm all over Reggie's gym bag, Reggie realized a few things.

1\. Jason probably hadn't taken his drug money and run away with Polly Cooper like everyone had assumed.  
2\. Jason was dead. Absolutely dead.  
3\. Jason had been chosen to haunt Reggie, which was super unfair because there were a bunch of other people Jason could be haunting, beginning with Jason's own crazy sister and ending with Riverdale High's ghoulish outcast Jughead Jones, who might even have enjoyed the experience.  
4\. Reggie couldn't tell anyone any of this, because if he took a problem like this to his parents his mother would hysterically ask if he'd started doing drugs instead of embracing the natural high caused by good clean exercise, and his father would say something like:

"Have you tried not being insane, Reggie? Really? Really?"

So Reggie told no one, which in hindsight was a shitty thing to do, but then like a month and a half passed and no one found the body and so he thought he was in the clear.

He was pretty upset at being one of the first people interviewed by Sheriff Keller, because for a second he thought Keller knew. 

Then he realized that this was crazy. Jason was fading in and out all over the interrogation room like he was made of horror movie static, and everything smelled disgustingly sweet like maple (which was Jason's unique ghost scent) and spectral worms and shit kept trying to crawl all over the Sheriff's shoulders. 

And still Keller didn't even notice.

"Son, if I was trying to figure out who'd killed him, a sports rival would be pretty near top of the list," Keller said.

"Are you saying you're not trying very hard to figure out who killed him?" Reggie said. "Whatever. I want a lawyer."

-

It did suck that it was murder. Even if it made sense, given the general state of Jason's soul. Reggie had to assume that ghosts that died of natural causes wouldn't interrupt school announcements by crawling out of the floor on all fours with maple trees growing out of their ears. 

Nobody else seemed to smell the maple or see Jason, which annoyed Reggie. Not even Jughead Jones could see it, which really annoyed him. 

If you wanted to start a rumor about someone at Riverdale High secretly collecting small dead animals, Jughead Jones would be a good candidate for that rumor. If you felt like tweeting about how a classmate was astral-plane married to Jeffrey Dahmer, you could do a lot worse than name Jughead that classmate. In a way, Jughead, too, was living his life at three-hundred-and-thirty-three percent. It was just that Reggie was three-hundred-and-thirty-three percent awesome, while Jughead had perfected being three-hundred-and-thirty-three percent eerie. In kindergarten, Reggie had wondered, "Is Jughead ever going to talk to anybody?" and in third grade he'd wondered, "How come Jughead thinks he doesn't have to try to make friends?" and now he wondered, "How long until Jughead starts a Manson cult, though?"

"Yes," Jason hissed, batting at the leaves of the skeletal maple tree. "Jughead. Yes."

"Did he kill you?" Reggie hissed back, grateful that most people were listening to Cheryl make a dramatic speech and couldn't see him hissing at nothing. "Did that creepo kill you?"

"No," Jason admitted. His eyes -- disgusting glassy marbles -- stopped rolling around in their sockets for two seconds, which showed that he was serious.

Reggie felt not exactly disappointed, but something close to it.

He allowed himself to consider the alternate universe where things made sense and Jughead was a vicious killer. He, Reggie Mantle, could then be the one to say, "Ha, I was right," and also, "Twitch your way out of this one. I have proof of your crimes," and also, "Sure, I've bullied you since kindergarten, but you're the reason I'm being haunted, so who's really the bad guy here?"

This wasn't that universe but he kind of wanted it to be. As it was, he and Jughead had nothing to talk about and so Reggie couldn't even ask his advice on what to do when you were being haunted. 

He did gamely try to get Jughead to admit to the crime anyway, just on principle, but then Archie Andrews stepped in and Reggie had to do some pounding, and Jason really went berserk.

"Archie," he moaned all the way home. "Yes. Archie!"

So then Reggie briefly considered whether Archie had killed Jason.

He cornered Archie outside the music room the next day and said, low, "Andrews. What would you say if I told you I knew what went down between you and Jason, and Jason was all Jacob Marley over it?"

If Archie had killed Jason, he would have gotten scared at that. But all Archie did was blink and say, "Yeah, we both took music lessons. But I had no idea Jason was ever into reggae."

-

The real problem with Jason was that he wasn't a good communicator. 

"Veronica!" he hissed at Reggie one day. "Veronica!"

Termites were crawling out of his ears and skeletal autumn leaves were growing out from his fingernail beds. The presence of insects meant that he was really agitated, because it was a departure from the maple thing. Jason usually stuck to his maple thing. In life, Jason had been an extremely organized person with a near-psychotic need to have everything matched and themed appropriately, and in death he was no different. Maple was his thing. He did maple. Maple and insects gave Reggie pause.

Still, Reggie waited until Moose had zipped up and left the spectral-termite-infested bathroom. Then he glared balefully at Jason and said, "You never even met Veronica!"

Or so he thought. Maybe Veronica had snuck into town around July 4th just to murder Jason. Or maybe Reggie was becoming extremely paranoid, because Jason had been haunting him for months.

"Your treatment of women," Jason hissed now. "Your crimes. You must right them, Reggie."

"You wrote in the playbook too," Reggie said. "Don't get high and mighty with me."

Reggie was at least even-handed in who he wrote up. Everyone from Midge to Betty Cooper to Tina Patel to Kevin Keller, but not Jughead because Reggie didn't want people to think he was into dark shit. But Jason -- no. Jason had fixated intently on one girl, destroyed her reputation, won her back with some twisted Romeo and Juliet starcrossed lover nonsense, knocked her up, and then gone and died on her.

By comparison, the worst Reggie had ever done was tell people that Archie Andrews had let him do the greasy maple griddler stack. That was a sexual act that Reggie had completely made up in order to score twenty-seven points in one go and hold it over Moose's head for the next three weeks.

So he ignored Jason for the rest of the week, which only made Jason hissier and creepier. Jason started standing just behind him in the hall and making him feel like syrup was slowly dripping down his back. It put Reggie in such a shitty mood that when he caught up to Ethel by the water fountain, he grabbed the last Dixie cup to spite her.

Jason howled right in his ear. It was the spectral howl of a ghostly wind playing through eleven thousand acres of maple wood. In other words, painfully loud.

"Fine," Reggie said. "Here, Ethel. Take the stupid cup."

It should have ended there, but then the girls turned Chuck into maple-hot tub soup and exposed the playbook and Reggie got dragged into Weatherbee's office because his name was in it, and so he had to plead his case.

"Okay," Reggie said. "First of all, I told Coach months ago about the playbook because I put it in my powerpoint about how Jason shouldn't be captain of the Bulldogs. Second of all, I was an equal opportunity playbook participant so it's not harassment against women specifically--"

"I saw that," Weatherbee said. "Kevin Keller and Archie Andrews. What is a greasy maple griddler stack?"

"A food," Reggie said. "Literally ninety percent of the sex acts in that book are just various kinds of maple-related foods."

Weatherbee looked at him sternly, like this didn't get Reggie off the hook.

"Okay, if I'm such a misogynist, then how come I gave Ethel Muggs the last Dixie cup?" Reggie said, exasperated. "There were no more Dixie cups at the water fountain and I gave her the last one."

"Well, that does show some strength of character," Weatherbee admitted. "If it is in fact true."

Ethel, thankfully, corroborated his story, so he was allowed to stay on the team. But then Jason looked smug all weekend and took to waking Reggie up in the middle of the night by pressing sticky fingers against his face and whispering, "'Tis a far, far better thing doing stuff for _other_ people." 

So it was a hollow victory.


	2. Chapter 2

On Tuesday, Betty and Archie were arguing outside Pop's. Jason took Betty's side, smearing maple syrup and blood all over the parking lot in a complicated pattern that eventually spelled out:

B E T T Y! B E T T Y!

J E N N I F E R G I B S O N I S L Y I N G.

"Jen Nifergib Sonisly Ing?" Reggie said, just to be an asshole. "No idea what you want me to tell Betty, dude."

So, as an act of ghostly revenge, Jason took up the Jughead obsession again. That night he started whimpering Jughead's name while he acted out classic movies. Supporting roles were of course played by maple trees.

Reggie suffered Jason as _Carrie_ and a tree typing out _all work and no play makes Jack a dull boy_ before it started to hack into Jason with an axe. At that point, Reggie was able to tune it out and fall asleep. But then in the morning, Jason sat down next to the Mantles at breakfast and turned their scrambled eggs into rotting, maggot-infested maple sugar. For dinner that night, he made their pasta look like maple-syrup-covered worms.

"We all saw _Lost Boys_ , you fucking dick," Reggie told him under his breath. 

"Does anyone else smell maple?" asked Reggie's mother.

Reggie had the brief, glimmering hope that maybe someone else could sense Jason.

"It's my new cologne," said Reggie's father. "They were selling it at Taste of Riverdale."

And it turned out that everybody was wearing it, so when the drive-in closed down and the whole town showed up for it, Reggie didn't even try to go. Instead he stayed home and stuffed cotton balls up his nose just to try and get that smell out. It didn't really work, because Jason wasn't in his nose. He was in his head.

"Jughead!" Jason hissed again.

"What?" Reggie said. "What do you want me to do with Jughead? I can't un-Jughead Jughead, okay? He's going to be creepy for the rest of his life. I can't save him from that. I can't work miracles. I've tried, and I really think I should get credit for that."

The next day at school, as if to prove a point, Jughead kept sneaking in and out of the janitor's closet under the stairs. Reggie only noticed because Jason set up a trail of sticky maple syrup footprints in Jughead's wake, thus suggesting that he wanted Reggie to understand something critical about these travels to and from the closet. And then possibly he wanted Reggie to do something about them.

"He's getting high between classes?" Reggie guessed during second period, and got a locker full of spectral maple leaves for his trouble.

"No one will talk to him but the mops," Reggie decided during fourth period. Jason started trying to plug his ears up with maple sap.

Whatever the problem was, Jason was still really bad at explaining it and Reggie was still disinclined to try and care, because Jughead had been weird and twitchy and superior for like going on sixteen years now, despite many _many_ completely friendly pranks Reggie had played on him to try and get him to loosen up and also acknowledge that Reggie was the best. Jughead had never acknowledged this. Reggie was not in a mood to forgive him for it.

But he was starting to get sick of sap in his ears, so eventually he caved and tracked Jughead down as the school day was ending.

"So," he said, cornering Jughead by the auditorium. "Jughead."

Jughead stared, all lanky spider limbs and baleful glare. And inappropriately good hair for someone who wore the stupidest hat in the world.

"What do you want, Reggie?" he said, like he expected the worst.

"How are things?" Reggie asked stiffly.

"Aside from our classmate's grisly murder; the destruction of the social ladder that let you and your cronies perpetuate years of gender-based harassment; the dangerous survivalist instincts of the local boy scout troop; the way our town's history slips from us, day by day, hour by hour, moment by moment--"

"Oh my god. I can't do this," Reggie said. "You are so annoying." 

He'd been trying really hard to put up with Jughead's Jugheadness by focusing on things like Jughead's pale neck and collection of beauty marks, but then he had to listen to Jughead fucking narrate at him and all the weird aesthetic appreciation turned into a completely understandable desire to wring Jughead's skinny geek throat.

"Hey, you came up to me, pal," Jughead said now, holding out his hands like he wanted to fight.

This was another annoying thing about Jughead. He probably weighed a hundred pounds wet underneath his seventeen usual layers of denim and flannel, but he gave the impression of being scrappy in a fight. It was like: okay, yes, he might be easy to beat. Or he might be a teenage serial killer in a 90s movie. 

"I can't do this," Reggie said again, as Jason began to wail and collapse into a pile of oily-looking maple taffy. "Nope. Nope. Nope, nope, nope."

-

Despite the occasional setback, Reggie was pretty good at resisting Jason. He steered clear of Jason's sister no matter how much Jason begged or threw sticky sap temper tantrums; he asked zero questions about Jason's ex-girlfriend no matter how many times Jason tried to suffocate him in the dead of night with spectral handfuls of maple leaves while moaning Polly's name; and he put his foot down about taking Jason's special horror show to Jason's funeral. That last one he was especially proud of. He didn't want to have to deal with the inevitable maple meltdown that was bound to occur if Jason had to face his shitty parents as they spewed lies over his coffin.

But then football season began in earnest. And at practice, Jason could really throw him off. And that was really bad, because Reggie might not care about a lot of things, but he really cared about the Bulldogs. 

But Jason got so annoyed at Reggie engaging in some perfectly normal, playful competition with Archie that he flooded the field with maple sap. And only Reggie seemed to get stuck in it.

"What are you -- eighty five years old?" Coach Clayton shouted at him. "Hustle, Mantle! You'd think you didn't even want to be captain."

"Jason, I swear to god," Reggie said under his breath.

Jason, now wearing his old jersey, waved at him from the stands. His fingers were maple twigs.

"You must repent," he told Reggie, once practice was over and Reggie was trying to towel off and Jason was trying to paint syrup skeletons on the walls of the changing room. "You must learn to care for others."

"Ky-aar?" Reggie said, to be an asshole.

"Care!"

"Curr?"

" _Care_!"

Jason turned his entire body into sticky maple sap so that he looked like the teen dream version of an old Aunt Jemima bottle, and lunged at Reggie. 

"I'm messing with you," Reggie said, low, rolling his eyes and dodging the sticky attack. He bumped into Moose and shoved Moose off like Moose was at fault. "I know what caring is, Jason."

"Did you say Jason?" Moose said.

"I miss him," Reggie said, tapping Jason's name plate with his middle finger. "God. I miss him so much."

Jason shrieked and turned into bark and started to clack his weird bark teeth together menacingly. When he inhaled, it wasn't really inhaling, but the sound of a youth's screams as he was tortured to death in the cold trails between the trees.

It was weirdly sad. Reggie wasn't trying to do right by Jason when, at next practice, he tried to get Archie to take it easy on his arm. He was mostly just trying to do right by the Bulldogs. But the act of semi-caring seemed to make Jason calm down and look more or less human for that afternoon, which, okay, was a bonus.

-

If he was nice, he could keep Jason from being too annoying, so he started being nicer. And he started with Archie, who was dumb but hot -- an automatic triple score in the playbook despite being a dude because even the jocks all had to agree that he'd someday make somebody a very nice trophy wife.

Reggie appreciated Archie, in his own way. So he did Archie the favor of booing him off the stage at the talent show auditions.

In response, Jason started oozing sap from his eyelids and having seizures. When Reggie was alone and could ask why, Jason said, "You must be kind!"

Reggie said, "Dude, have you heard him sing? Do you really want him to sing in front of humans? Who have ears? I am being kind."

Jason turned back into normal, sapless Jason and considered it. Then he rasped out, "I see your point of view."

-

Some days, though, there was no point being nice because Jason was just going to go on a wailing-about-Cheryl kick or a wailing-about-Polly-kick, and at that point nothing short of Reggie ending world poverty would make him shut up.

On those days, Reggie usually committed himself to working out or running so that he could stay in peak physical condition for the Bulldogs. Jason usually tagged along so that he could smear the roads with sticky blood, or ooze sap and entrails all over the racks in the weight room. 

One day, when they were jogging by the strip of rail that separated the North Side from the South Side (or Reggie was jogging and Jason was floating, pulling his bones out through his navel, and then wringing those bones like old dishrags in order to produce ectoplasmic maple sap that spelled out his sister's name when it hit the ground), they came across the Serpents.

They were doing wicked Serpent things, which was to say looking sinister in leather jackets and probably talking about their most recent successful crack deals. Reggie jogged calmly past them. The Serpents were a highly dangerous, but surprisingly stylish organized gang, so Reggie had always avoided causing them any bother. And Reggie was the son of a wealthy man who believed in clean living and also Reggie had hit 6'3" and was still growing, so the Serpents had always avoided causing him any bother. This arrangement had worked well for all parties involved for basically Reggie's entire life.

Only now, as Reggie jogged past, one of them said, "...is that Jason Blossom?"

Reggie stopped and turned around. 

The Serpent who'd spoken looked like the toughest and baddest Serpent, but also the least stylish, since he had red-rimmed eyes and stubby, ungroomed facial hair and appeared to have slept in his clothes. 

"Boss?" said another Serpent nervously. "That kid looks nothing like Jason Blossom."

The Serpent boss pointed right at where Jason was currently pulling his teeth out of his own head in order to build a tooth diorama of a maple leaf. Then the Serpent boss blinked. Then he shook his head. Then he pulled a flask out his jacket and started drinking.

"Is that -- is that fucking Jason Blossom?" he said again, after a few good swigs.

Reggie considered the pros and cons of letting a drunken criminal in on his secret.

"No," he said decisively, and jogged away.

After he'd cleared a few blocks, he turned to Jason and demanded, "How come he could see you?"

Jason didn't immediately answer because he was dancing in mid-air to a tinkling ragtime tune, his arm around a beautiful maple tree that somehow looked exactly like his sister.

"How come?" Reggie said again.

"He's drukn," Jason said.

"What?"

"Drukn."

Jason should not have been able to pronounce those last two letters like that; first the _k_ then right away an _n_. But he did.

"Are you trying to say drunk?"

Jason shook his head and dipped the tree-Cheryl.

" _Drukn_ ," Jason said. "An unremitting, long-term, functional drunkenness that leaves you so barely tethered to reality that you can see ghosts."


End file.
